Why and how to avoid silencing “others”

Miami has always been a favorite travel spot of mine. It was the first big city I ever visited without my parents. As a high school student from Sand Springs, OK, I represented the state of Oklahoma at the Future Business Leaders of America national conference.

Since then, I’ve
flown to Miami numerous times for business and pleasure, always enjoying the
sun, ocean, stone crabs, architecture, and night lights.

When I was there
in late January for a business meeting, I expected to savor my time in a
familiar place.

Instead, my 48-hour stay was anything
but ordinary. For the first time, I experienced Miami as a member of the
minority. Within two groups of bilingual speakers, I was the Anglo who only
spoke English.

Most of my
colleagues I met up with in Miami speak Spanish as their first language. The
rest had learned Spanish in school or on the job. It was totally natural for
all of them to speak Spanish during meeting breaks with the staff at the hotel,
restaurants, and the airport plus the Uber drivers as well as the airport
shuttle bus drivers.

Initially I felt ostracized, a member of
the out-group. That’s
natural, as I remembered from all of my neuroscience training. We like to be
around people like us, so who was I to deny my colleagues the opportunity to
speak Spanish?

After all, when I spoke–in English–everyone could understand me and respond in English. I felt perfectly safe and content.

Meanwhile,
while I was enjoying Miami, two
individuals further north were making national news for their insensitive
remarks about people of other nationalities.

Do you wonder if they stopped to think before they spoke or wrote the email message?

That’s one lesson they should have learned.

The second lesson they should have learned is to pause and put yourself in others’ shoes before speaking or acting. When you practice what should be our innate “theory of mind” ability, you’re able to understand how others are likely to react in certain situations. For example, the Duke professor should have figured out, like I did, that a group of people who share common experiences and a common language often enjoy speaking to one another in that language. It’s a way to tighten social bonds and common heritage.

The third lesson they could have learned – which is probably a graduate level lesson for each of them — is the value of showing empathy for others. Empathy goes beyond theory of mind.

When you’re empathetic, you consider another person’s situation from their point of view, rather from your own. That can start to create deeper understanding between you and make a stronger connection. (For more about this, check out my Forbes.com article, How Empathetic Are You, Really?)

Instead, Brokaw gave a master class in how the empathy network
in the brain gets disengaged when you feel powerful or believe you have higher
status than others.

This is a particular
problem when you’re talking with or about people who are not part of your
in-group, and who may be of a different race. You may literally not feel their
pain. For example, in an important study, research subjects watched individuals
as needles penetrated their cheeks. The research subjects noted much greater pain
when the individuals with the needles were the same racial group. (See the
research study Do you feel my pain? Racial group membership modulated
empathic neural responses.)

And there’s yet another lesson that seemed to go
over their heads. Those who are bilingual and bicultural have important skills
in our increasingly multi-ethnic, multilingual society.